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Monday, April 1, 2013

NYT Book Review prints another false stereotype that supports an ideological assumption.

By Marc JampoleLately it appears
that the New York Times Book Review
is trading in stereotypes that support the basic ideological assumptions of
American life. Or maybe, I’m just starting to notice it.

About two months
ago, OpEdge analyzed a book review that used the not-really-a-super-genius
biographical subject of the book under critique as proof that super geniuses
are also madmen, a common stereotype that supports the ideological assumption
that it’s bad to be smart and that smart people have social adjustment problems
and are unhappier than the average person.The stereotype is false and the ideological assumption—big-banged into
us constantly by mass media and entertainment—is not only also false, but
serves as a false model for our youth.

The NYT Book Review is at it again this week,
publishing a review of a new biography of Karl Marx in which the reviewer
presents another false stereotype as gospel: that political radicals are dirty,
flighty, loud-mouthed moochers.

Let’s allow the
reviewer, Jonathan Freedland, an editorial page columnist for The Guardian of London, to hang himself
with his own words:

"The Karl
Marx depicted in Jonathan Sperber’s absorbing, meticulously researched
biography will be unnervingly familiar to anyone who has had even the most
fleeting acquaintance with radical politics. Here is a man never more
passionate than when attacking his own side, saddled with perennial money
problems and still reliant on his parents for cash, constantly plotting new,
world-changing ventures yet having trouble with both deadlines and personal
hygiene, living in rooms that some might call bohemian, others plain ‘slummy’…”

The key words come at the beginning: The Karl Marx depicted…will be unnervingly familiar to anyone who has
had even the most fleeting acquaintance with radical politics. That sets
the scene for Freedland’s description of the hippy of hippies who, worst of
all, is living off his folks.

Of course, Freedland is right that most radical political groups
have some loud ne’er-do-wells who could bathe more often. In fact, I’ve seen
them at every political demonstration that I have ever attended. They have
certainly been part of the Occupy protests.

But I’ve also seen smelly wide-eyed hippies at adult chess
tournaments.

I’ve seen them at churches and synagogues.

I’ve seen them on every college campus I have ever visited. I used
to see one or two slip out of the offices of the Young Republicans when I was
in college.

I’ve seen them at public meetings, ball games and parades.

But these other places, institutions and organizations where
humans of all sorts collect and interact don’t get tarred with the label of
producing people who "are saddled
with perennial money problems and still reliant on his parents for cash,
constantly plotting new, world-changing ventures yet having trouble with both
deadlines and personal hygiene…” (well maybe chess, an intellectual game to
which weirdness is also unfairly attached.)

The most subtle
aspect of Freedland’s cheap shot at the left is that the smelly hippy in
question is Karl Marx. First of all,
placing the stereotype in the context of discussing the life of the leading
theoretician of communism limits the definition of “radical” to the left.

Freedland expresses
a coy shock at learning that Marx fits what he calls a “recognizable pattern.”
By applying the pattern narrowly to left-wing radicals, Freedland tries to make
the left less palatable, just as all the images of intellectuals as socially
inept make cracking a book and learning something less palatable.

Freedland wraps a
neat bow on his ideological package by declaring additional shock at learning
that Marx is not some revolutionary icon, but a “genuine human being,” to use
his words. Yes, I’m confident that Marx is presented as more human than symbol in
the book under review, Karl Marx, a
Nineteenth-Century Life by Jonathan Sperber.

But in Freedland’s
review, Marx comes off as an unsavory but buffoonish cartoon character.

Of course, that’s
the image that the mass media wants us to have of the left.

If it weren’t for the entertainment value, I’d be pleased that Texas Governor Rick Perry is foundering in the Republican presidential race. After all, Governor Perry, who is in an unprecedented fourth term as chief executive of the nation's second-largest state, still might get the Republican nomination for president. If that happens there’s no telling what the voters might be fooled into doing. Just look at how far George W. Bush got.